The Definitive Guide to Building a Remote Team

By Eric

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years, it’s clear that technology has dramatically changed how the workplace looks, feels and runs.

Professionals across many disciplines can telecommute and effectively work with colleagues all over the world. But it isn’t just workers enjoying the fruits of this change. Employers are also benefiting from remote teams, as they can choose from a larger pool of skilled workers and avoid the costs and complexities associated with keeping everyone on-site.

“It is apparent that remote teams are going to become far more commonplace as companies are increasingly beginning to conduct business online… In many ways, remote work is an ongoing experiment in business, as it has only been fully embraced by some companies in the past decade or so, showing healthy growth with an 80% increase in “telecommunicating” employees from 2005 to 2012.”

However, building remote teams introduces some unique challenges as well. You’ll need to do your due diligence to be sure you’re hiring talented employees, invest heavily in training your remote staff and work hard at building remote employees’ morale.

Remote Teams Are Changing the Role of Management

Remote teams were almost unheard of 20 years ago, but they’re gradually becoming the norm. According to data from ESNA, 77% of virtual companies with over 2,500 employees allow telecommuting and 20% of the global workforce is part of a remote team. Remote teams exist within multinational companies such as Dell, Apple and Cisco, but they’re also a core part of the workforce in smaller firms such as Buffer, Basecamp, 10Up and Articulate.

Buffer offers one particular model that all organizations hoping to create remote teams should follow. Recently, Courtney Seiter, a content marketer and brand storyteller for the company, wrote a detailed article about the factors that made their remote team so successful. Key among her recommendations are using tools such as Hipchat and sharing pictures regularly – both for finishing work and having fun.

Remote teams wouldn’t have become so common if they couldn’t be managed successfully. However, overseeing virtual teams can be more difficult, which is why companies will need to have a clear vision and a clear plan of action to succeed.

So what does it take to create a successful remote team? Every workplace requires the following things to be successful:

Talented employees

A strong communication network

Incentives to boost motivation and employee loyalty

A monitoring system for ensuring employees are meeting their goals and identifying issues that need to be addressed

These requirements are no less true for remote teams than for brick-and-mortar employees, but implementing them with workers who aren’t in the office requires substantial strategic planning. To begin on the path towards seamlessly managing teams of remote employees, you’ll need to start with some logistics.

Hiring Remote Employees

Your employees are the core of your organization, which is why it’s crucial that you choose people that are capable of doing the job properly – whether they’re doing it from your office or their homes. Hiring remote workers is tricky, so keep the following considerations and principles in mind:

Remote Recruitment Challenges

Finding the right fit for any position is difficult, but the process is considerably more challenging when you’re building a virtual team. In this case, you’ll face a couple of extra challenges, including all of the following:

You may not be able to interview them in person, which can make it more difficult to assess their abilities.

Technical competencies aren’t the only factors that need to be taken into consideration. You must also factor the candidate’s ability to communicate virtually, work independently and stay committed to their work.

Your employees may be based in various parts of the world, which can make it difficult to make unequivocal comparisons between their education, certificates and other credentials.

Making the right hiring decisions is both the most important and most difficult step in the remote team building process. Make sure that you do the proper due diligence before making any hiring decisions.

Choosing the Right Remote Workers to Join Your Team

Since there are a number of unique challenges involved in hiring remote employees, you’ll need to take a different approach to hiring them than you would traditional workers. Here are some tips to help guide you through the process.

No matter where they are in the world, you should always have a live interview with candidates before hiring them. Career coach and renowned author Nick Morgan cites considerable research showing that body language communicates what someone is feeling before their subconscious mind has an opportunity to process it.

As a result, conducting live interviews will help you gauge whether someone is genuinely interested in their career and whether they are being honest about their qualifications. You can also tell how well they operate under pressure, given the stress associated with the interview process.

If possible, conduct interviews in person, as this will give you a better opportunity to study the candidate’s body language. If your employee is located nearby, hold an interview at your office or at your favorite restaurant. If not, conduct a video interview using Skype or some other video streaming service. Research from OfficeTeam suggests 63% of employers conduct online video job interviews, demonstrating just how effective they can be.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to tell how good someone is at their job based on standard job interview questions – especially if you’re hiring for tech or strategy-based positions. As a result, you’ll need to get creative about assessing their competencies. There are a couple of things that you’ll want to do to make sure your candidates have the skills they need.

First, you can use online skills assessment tools. Elance, Odesk and other online job sites offer tools and quizzes to test worker’s abilities to make sure they’re qualified. Or, if you’re hiring your staff directly, you can try a site like Eskill, which offers employment tests for many different jobs. You can also create your own test by asking finalist candidates to complete a small task that’s representative of the type of work they’d be doing for your company.

It’s also a good idea to check references from prior employers or clients. LinkedIn testimonials and personal recommendations make it much easier to see which candidates have the right skill sets. If possible, speak directly with the references your candidate provides to determine whether or not they’re up to the task.

Business Outcomes Consulting is one firm that relies heavily on candidate testing through Eskill. According to Patty Carroll, the company’s Managing Director of Client Services:

“Clients tell us that the services we offer through our alliance with Profiles International gives them access to powerful tools and data that was only be available to the largest of companies until recently. These new products capitalize on the strength and popularity of the ProfilesXT® line and are based on the requests of clients around the globe.”

Determine their level of self-motivation

Self-motivation is an extremely important trait when hiring virtual employees. They won’t have any coworkers in the next cubicle helping keep them on task, so it’s important to ensure that they’re able to work independently before bringing them onto your team. The following tips will help you measure candidates’ ability to work on their own:

Require your employees to take an online test to measure their self-motivation. Psychology Today has a great 102 question test on its website. You can also ask them to take the MMPI (Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory) to see if their personality type is appropriate for working on a remote team.

Get a sense of their level of interest in the company. Employees will be much more motivated to stay on track if they’re sincerely passionate about their work and employer. Their eagerness should be apparent during the live interview.

Consider their initiative throughout the hiring process. Did you need to send follow-up emails frequently or were they proactive about touching base and moving to the next step? This is indicative of their ability to work well on their own.

Ask open-ended questions to see how they’d handle specific issues. If their answers indicate that they’d generally wait for direction from their supervisor, then they may not be the best fit for your remote team.

Obviously, you’ll need to use your own judgment when determining whether or not a candidate has the skills needed for remote work. Ask anybody interviewing for an off-site position if they’re capable of remote management, and they’re probably going to tell you “yes.” Look beyond your candidates’ responses and see if they’re actions line up with their assertions.

Consider time-zone and communication issues

The Internet allows you to work with people from all over the world. There are exceptionally talented people in all countries, but some of them may not be easy to work with. If employees are located more than eight hours away, you may encounter some real challenges if you need to hold live discussions as a team.

You’re also likely to run into some problems if your remote hires don’t speak your language fluently. While these factors may not overly problematic for some positions, they may mean that hiring employees for other positions simply isn’t feasible. Make sure that you’re realistic about which localities are right for sourcing remote workers, as well as your ability to cope with the potential frustrations of off-site hires (relative to the cost benefits of sourcing workers from outside your home country).

Building a Virtual Culture for Your Organization

Ultimately, the success of your remote team hinges on your ability to create an organizational culture that people will be pleased to be part of.

In 2003, Walt Scacchi, a professor with the Institute for Software Research at the University of California of Irvine, stated that the sudden rise in open source software had drastically increased the number of people working remotely, which was changing the dynamics of the company culture – and not necessarily for the better.

In his opinion, employees need to work directly with one another to develop a company culture and make it successful. In the decade since he shared his case study, the prevalence of online teams has only accelerated. So whether you agree with him or not, it’s clear that the need for employees to build strong virtual cultures is more important than ever.

Unfortunately, fostering a culture for a virtual team is considerably more difficult than it is with in-person workers. Here are a few ideas for growing a great company culture – even if your workers are spread out around the world:

Communicate the company vision to your team

All of your employees – remote or otherwise – need to share a common set of principles and goals. Without them, you simply can’t have a company culture.

Communicate your vision and expectations from day one. Use tools like Google Docs, Hackpad, Podio or another cloud collaboration service so that your employees can reference your vision at any time and remember the threads that unite them.

The details of your company vision should include the following:

A clear mission statement highlighting the company’s primary goals

A standard procedure for addressing common challenges

A clear set of expectations that all employees must follow

There should be no ambiguity about your company’s mission or the expectations of your workers. Make sure that any information you provide is clearly defined and immediately address any questions that arise if there’s any confusion.

Find creative ways to form bonds

Developing connections between virtual employees isn’t impossible by any means. John Turley, for example, was a virtual employee for Sun Microsystems before starting his own mediation group. Of the strong relationships he forged with his colleagues at Sun, he says:

“I remain friends with many of my Sun Microsystems virtual team colleagues more than ten years after our last calls. We collaborated effectively on global projects while learning more and more about each other’s interests.”

Building rapport between your employees is very important. Employees are more loyal to people they like, but it’s difficult for them to like people that they’ve never met. So, short of flying everyone in to a company retreat several times a year, you need to find ways to keep your remote workers engaged and nurturing ties with one another.

Emma Inc. is a popular email marketing company with over 100 employees throughout the United States. The company has offices in four major cities, in addition to countless employees that work from home in other parts of the country. Once a year, though, the company holds a talent contest in Nashville, Tennessee for employees to get to know each other in person.

Some organizations believe that all employees should congregate from time to time. However, it isn’t always necessary – or affordable – to meet in person. As Seiter pointed out above, Hipchat is a great way for your employees to get to know each in an informal setting so that they can build relationships without ever having to meet in person. You can also encourage your employees to try connecting with each other on SnapChat, so they can get a sense of what everyone else looks like in person to build more intimate relationships with one another. There are plenty of tools available, so there’s really no reason for anyone to feel disconnected.

Mary Sobon, a business consultant that works with the company, also argues that tradition is a very effective way to build employee relationships. “You have to go outside your four walls, literally. You won’t be able to do what you want to by bringing people into your building. It just doesn’t work.”

You don’t necessarily need to make everyone meet in person, but you do need to make sure they connect on some level. For instance, you may want to find ways for people to collaborate together on projects – even when it isn’t entirely necessary. This will help them feel a sense of commitment to each other, which will help reinforce that they’re part of a larger organization.

You may also want to hold monthly, or even weekly, check-ins for people to touch base and get to know each other better. These can be coordinated through Skype, Google Hangouts or any other virtual video service.

Get the Right Tools

Besides Skype and Google Hangouts, there are several remote work tools out there that your organization can use to make these alternative work arrangements a success.

Check out any – or all – of the following, depending on your specific needs:

Slack – I used to be a big fan of HipChat, but lately, Slack has been my go-to tool for chatting with remote workers. Its interface is clean, and the program’s setup makes it easy to segment group conversations from one-on-one messaging with remote employees. Fun tip? Check out the tool’s Giphy feature, which lets you insert random animated images based on your chosen keywords.

Trello – If you aren’t already familiar with Trello, now’s the time to get to know this powerful project management tool. I use it to manage the remote workers I collaborate with on content for Single Grain and Growth Everywhere, and its visual interface means everybody’s on the same page – no matter where they are. And best of all? Its free version will be more than enough for most users.

Asana – If Trello isn’t quite your style, definitely check out Asana. It’s another free project management tool that, if anything, is even more fully-featured than Trello. Use it to create workspaces for different teams, projects for each group to work on and specific tasks that can be assigned to different workers and moved throughout the system. It’s a great option if your projects require more granularity of control than Trello permits.

HelloSign – Working with remote workers occasionally requires gathering remote signatures, and HelloSign is my favorite tool for the job. There are a few different tools that’ll do this for you – and really, any of them will be better than printing out documents, signing the paper copies and then scanning them back in – but HelloSign’s interface is my favorite of these different options.

Join.me – Join.me is one of my favorite low-frills web conferencing tools. While other more fully-featured options like GoToWebinar exist for this need, I don’t like paying for features I won’t actually use. Join.me’s free version is often enough for one-on-one desktop-sharing conferences, but even it’s paid version is affordable compared to others in the space.

Hackpad – Think of Hackpad like Google Docs on steroids. This collaboration tool lets me create documents that my remote workers can view and edit, but what’s really great about the program is that it tracks who made what changes and when the changes occurred. I use it to share things like editorial guidelines, and I’ve always been pleased with the visibility it offers to my remote employees.

LastPass – Finally, if your business uses any kind of shared logins, it needs LastPass. This free password management tool lets you generate secure passwords and then stores them to be automatically entered into login fields when they appear. A premium version is available for Enterprise users, but in either case, you’ll want to use this tool to avoid the insecure method of emailing passwords or sharing all of your company’s passwords with users who may eventually leave your business.

Managing Workers and Measuring Results

Companies with virtual teams are often on the forefront of innovation. But this doesn’t mean remote management is easy. Since you aren’t in the same building as your employees, you must take different steps to keep them motivated and to oversee their work.

Michael Watkins, a development coach for Genesis Advisers and a contributor to Harvard Business Review, recognizes the struggles that virtual project managers face. A couple of years ago, he raised a question in his LinkedIn group to see what steps managers needed to take to oversee their remote teams effectively. He received numerous responses from other professionals that can be invaluable to anyone trying to organize a remote team.

Here are some of the key takeaways from his survey:

Create clear guidelines on how employees will communicate. Communication is much less frequent in a virtual setting, so you’ll need to make sure that there’s a clear protocol so that everyone stays in touch. Watkins also states that multi-point video conferencing and other cutting edge technology have eliminated many of the communication barriers employees face in a virtual organization, making this process easier than it had been before.

Make sure everyone has a chance to share their voice. It’s easy to overlook the value of feedback from some of your quieter virtual employees, but they can offer very insightful feedback if asked.

Make one-to-one management a core part of your operations strategy. Your team leaders are instrumental in making the organization work, and they can have a profound influence on employees if they engage independently. For this reason, you’ll need a managerial structure that involves having your managers regularly touch base with their subordinates to identify any upcoming problems and ensure they receive the resources they need.

Effective management is the essence of your company’s success. Follow these tips to make sure none of your virtual employees fall through the cracks. Don’t ever let your remote management approach become, “out of sight, out of mind.”

Compliance Control

In addition to supervising your employees, you’ll also need to make sure that you have a controls system in place. Specifically, you need to designate someone to be responsible for meeting certain goals and holding people accountable for reaching them. The protocol needs to be clearly established at the very beginning and communicated to every employee the day they join the team.

Of course, few companies operate under an authoritarian leadership model these days. Employees want to feel engaged and tend to be more successful if they’re empowered to make important decisions. Delegating authority to employees to handle more mundane tasks also frees up managerial resources for more crucial responsibilities.

However, Watkins claims that it’s more difficult to empower subordinates in remote teams, because you can’t always easily measure their individual contributions or levels of productivity. Delegating power to your employees is only effective if you can adequately measure their productivity. He may be overly cynical here, though, as new models appear to be pretty effective for measuring employee contributions.

There are a number of great tools that you can use to track productivity among your staff, such as Time Doctor and Tickspot. Time Doctor is a great app for keeping track of employee time. It also comes with a screen capture tool that allows you to make sure that your employees are actually on task. Syed Balkhi, a serial entrepreneur that founded the lead opt-in platform OptinMonster is among the people that have praised the tool:

“I find TimeDoctor to be the best tool in the market for tracking time for remote employees,” says Balkhi. “It even has the option for screen capture, required work hours and everything you could want in a time tracking software.”

Tickspot is a similarly useful tool. You can use it to not only measure employees’ productivity, but also to make sure that they’re doing their work within the budget you’ve specified.

Of course, you also have to measure your employees’ ability to actually meet your project and organizational goals. There are a variety of excellent project management solutions on the market for this purpose, including Podio, BaseCamp and Asana. You can use these tools to track tasks and easily communicate to your staff if changes need to be made on any projects. You can also incorporate Tickspot, Time Doctor or other productivity analytics tools into them, allowing you to monitor employee productivity at a glance.

Using these tools will make it easier to tell whether or not employees are pulling their weight and that they understand your expectations. Review the logs from your chosen project management tools periodically to see if there are any long-standing problems that need to be addressed, such as people regularly submitting work past deadlines or failing to follow your guidelines.

Yes, this is an additional monitoring component that managers of on-site employees don’t have to deal with, but the benefits of having a happier, more engaged remote staff may make the trade-off worth it.

Create a Successful Virtual Team

Managing a virtual team requires a substantial amount of time and energy. If you choose to go down this road, you simply must have these processes in place, as the success of your company depends on your ability to find the right talent, keep them motivated and hold them accountable for meeting your company goals.

Do you run a virtual team? What steps have you taken to ensure its success? I’ll show you how in my free online training here. Register now because this will be taken down soon.

Disclaimer: As with any digital marketing campaign, your individual results may vary.

Eric Siu (@ericosiu) is the CEO at Single Grain, a digital marketing agency that focuses on paid advertising and content marketing. He contributes regularly to Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes and more.